Copenhagen Wave Meetup

Yesterday, I went to a the first Google Wave Meetup in Denmark. It was a good event, I thought. Mostly a crowd of youngsters, many of them students at the IT University. Since the crowd was decidedly heterogeneous, we didn’t dive into any particular topic. Daniel Graversen gave a quick introduction to what the wave is and the many ways to use it, and Jacques Holst spoke about how students at ITU use wave for shared note-taking during lectures, for organizing and running meetings, etc. Finally, Daniel spoke about Wave gadgets and robots and the potential for programming for the Wave. It was agreed the next Meetup will focus on Wave programming.

We did shared minutes of the meeting, and Daniel has posted his slides and comments to the Mastering Wave blog.

I really liked the use-cases; I was impressed with the enthusiasm of the ITU students, and the number of people joining note-taking waves. For wave to evolve and find a place in the tool ecology, these kinds of experiments are crucial. One interesting observation was that waves, like wikis, evolve patters and user roles; Jacques mentioned a person on the shared-notes waves taking always doing small improvements (spelling, grammar issues, layout fixes), much like the WikiGnome wikipattern. Getting a sense of key wave patterns is probably as important as (and closely linked to) evolution of wave etiquette.

One thing about it I found interesting was the energy in the room. Despite the altogether different setting, it felt a lot like hanging out in terminal rooms talking about usenet in the mid-80, or giving the first Perl lectures in the late 80’s/early 90’s. There was that mix of enthusiasm, confusion, and sharing. I have no idea either the Copenhagen Wave community or the Wave in general will go, but this is fun. Thanks to Daniel for organizing and to Jacques for providing facilities.